Jennifer Myers, from The Globe and Mail published the story, Why more women aren’t becoming engineers, on Nov. 9, 2010 and made a number of interesting insights into this problem.

A lack of mentors was mentioned as one of the reasons young women are not attracted to the field, but Dr. Aboulnasr, dean of the faculty of applied science from UBC suggested that “we have focused too much on the technical side, on building things. Women tend to want to help people and choose careers that allow them to make a meaningful contribution to society, and may not see how engineering can have such an impact. Somehow we lost the message that engineering can improve lives.”

This lack of awareness of what engineers actually do and that engineering is “dirty work” may actually be keeping some women out of the field.

The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada released a report this month, Women in Science and Engineering in Canada. In their report they provide a review of the available statistics on women in science and engineering in Canada and look at the supply side through the education stream and immigration. They also refer to more positive role models and looking at the stereotypes and biases that keep women out of science and engineering programs as measures to help involve more women in these careers.

Let’s Talk Science also released survey results this month about Canadian teens and science, which showed that only one in three teens 16-18 are interested in taking science at the post-secondary level and 28% of teens in this age group believe that science has no relevance to everyday life.

There has been a lot of talk this month about science and engineering. Science isn’t seen by today’s youth as cool or exciting. It is seen as serious and intelligential. We absolutely lack female role models in science and engineering careers and perhaps have not done enough to link the positive contribution that these careers actually make to society to entice young women into the field.

How do you think we should go about changing the perception so more young people, especially young women chose this important path?